Measuring Crowds (Measuring the City): White Noise / White Light
By Hilary Sample
In 2003, The Athens Olympic Committee hosted an international competition and selected nine temporary site-specific projects to highlight the culture of the city in celebration of the Olympic Games. The project brief for the public art program, Catch the Light: Routes through Athens, stated that their ambition was to weave interactive art installations into the fabric of the historic center of the city. The most captivating of these was J. Meejin Yoon’s White Noise / White Light, an interactive project foregrounding the body against the context of a kinetic field of ephemeral light and noise. Positioned at the entry to the Ancient Theater of Dionysus just below the Acropolis, Yoon’s installation operates as an instrument to measure the city by calling on the crowds’ participatory activities, and fearlessly integrating technology into a production of a sublime urban spectacle.
What appears at first to be a static and neutral grid of vertical markers dissolves into a luminous sound-scape. Passersby are aurally lured to enter into the field of transparent strands, triggering an instant pulsing rhythm of white light and white noise activated by their presence and touch. Inspired by the notion of the body’s influence on its context of the city street, the work registers the slight shift in ground inflicted by the weight of a viewer’s presence. The base of the installation is a wooden platform structure, a reference to Athens’s fragile ground; it is made up of shifting sidewalks which negotiate archeological sites at every turn. Standing on this constructed ground amongst the chest-high fiber optic field, a synthetic horizon emerges as the grid flickers in the wake of the white light emanating from the strands. The strands trace the path of each inhabitant as he crosses the system, temporarily marking his personal space in the city. Brushing by the semi-flexible strands activates the passive infrared sensors and microprocessors embedded within, which display light in synchrony with the sound emitted from concealed speakers. "Sh"-ing and "whoosh"-ing noises create a sonic reprieve from the city, transporting the inhabitants to a field of white noise where equal amounts of sound (containing every frequency and vibration detected by human hearing) are mixed together to form energized micro-environments. The sonic experience effectively silences the noises of the encompassing city. Confronting, diverting and consuming the energy of the crowd, individual lines of light converge into an animated, three-dimensional mass that oscillated with eerie and shimmering effects.
White Noise / White Lightconflates both input and output in order to measure the body, the crowd and the city within a seamless technological landscape. The inception of the project reaches back to a
variation on themes presented at the "emBodied Tectonics" exhibition for the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects competition in 2002. There, works such as Defensible Dress and Interactive Pleated Wall had incorporated digitizers, infrared sensors, and motors embedded into new materials fabricated with CAD/CAM technology to sense and register their surroundings into a variety of responsive reactions. These earlier projects tested the physical limits between the individual body and its context through prosthetics. Yoon’s White Noise / White Light updates the concept for Athens, as she engages the crowd with the new medium in a material practice searching for new spatial measures.
Project Team: J. Meejin Yoon, Artist/Architect; Matthew Reynolds, Electronics
Engineer; Marlene Kuhn, Kyle Steinfeld, Naomi Munro, Lisa Smith, Eric Howeler;
Design Build Team
